The Whitney Bag: Renzo Piano Designs a Purse to Go with His New Museum
The Whitney Bag via Max Mara (L); The new Whitney Museum via 6sqft (R)
The architecture world has been pretty “meh” on Renzo Piano‘s new $422 million Whitney Museum, neither loving nor hating the patchwork of shapes and angles. But if the starchitect is hoping for a more glowing design review, he still has a chance with the fashion world. Piano has designed the Whitney bag, “directly inspired by the pure design and sophisticated materials of the new Whitney Museum of American Art,” for Italian fashion house Max Mara.
In an interview about the bag Piano said, “Our aim was to apply one of the most characteristic elements of the museum project – the façade – to the bag: hence the idea of the modular strips enveloping the exterior. We tried to maintain a simple, pure design, working only on the details by applying a creative use of technology and placing the accent on respect for the materials.”
There are only 250 calfskin bags in the limited edition collection, and they’ll each be branded with a numbered logo stamp inside. It’s available in three sizes and colors–black, bordeaux, and tan–as well as an exclusive collectors’ edition in a light blue-grey color reminiscent of the metallic shade of the museum’s facade.” The interior is red suede, and, according to Dezeen, the “metal components are reminiscent of the stanchions securing the building’s tension cables.”
The Whitney bag is part of Max Mara’s Pre-Fall 2015 collection, named Where the Wild Things Are. The entire collection was inspired by the new Whitney and its Meatpacking District location, described by the brand as “artistic memories and contaminations of a decadent urban context, in a return to wild nature.”
Profits from Whitney bag sales will go to the Renzo Piano Foundation to finance its cultural and educational projects. Head on over to Max Mara to learn more about the fashionable project.
[Via Dezeen]
Whitney Bag images via Max Mara
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